In My 50s, I Wasn’t Sure Who I Was — So I Asked

We spend the day traversing our old neighborhood. I knock on the door of the house we shared, hoping to be let in. The man who answers is in the middle of cooking and a bit hesitant, but he allows us to stand in the living room and reminisce for a few minutes about nights spent drinking malt liquor and writing haiku. After, we order milkshakes at the Dairy Queen that was built while we lived there. We make our way to the church where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were buried. Our first attempt, long ago, to find their graves — at night, without flashlights, while tipsy — failed. This time, success.

Four days later, Jen emails to say one more thing about my curiosity: “It galvanized me then and still does now. It gives me the courage to ask questions and not be afraid to push harder to understand the world around me.”

So the curiosity that used to land me in loads of trouble when I was young not only helps pay the bills but also aids others. Take that, permanent record. (And I suppose I don’t need to worry about being too wide-eyed for my age … at least not yet.)

My body clings to conflict

Melissa Prestinario, my fashion-forward friend in Paris, has known me since seventh grade, back when I thought it was funny to sneeze in her face. Sitting side by side atop an alley wall near the Picasso museum, she says, “From my intuition, I would say you probably absorb a lot, then end up getting sick.” She’s not wrong about my body soaking up even the slightest of skirmishes — whether I’m involved in them or simply a witness — then feeling run-down.

This tracks with what others in my life have said. I don’t deal well with conflict. I recoil or shut down.

I think about how my fundamentalist father often quoted the Bible when punishing me and declared when I was 10 that I’d go to hell if I missed church too much. Never mind that this was against the backdrop of Sedona, Arizona, where tourists from around the world still flock to find spiritual serenity.

And then it hits me: Unconsciously, I’m probably equating conflict with eternal damnation.

Talking to my ex-husband, Patrick Flanigan, in the house we used to share, he says, “There are three parts of a person: mind, body and spirit. I always felt like you put everything into your mind and body, because it was like your spirit was sort of forfeited already.”

Guess I’ll need to talk with my therapist about that.

I’m silly but seasoned

Driving through more old stomping grounds in Maryland on my way back home from North Carolina, I (separately) meet up with two men who knew me when I was cutting my teeth in the news business.

John Scheinman is another Journal colleague I keep in touch with, mostly through social media. Over northern Chinese dim sum, he characterizes me as “very willing and eager to be silly quickly.” He recounts when, one night after the bigwigs had gone home, I jumped up on the copy desk and asked him to join me in a mock-serious rendition of Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonite.” (He did.)

To be honest, I can see myself doing that today.

I catch up with Rafael Alvarez, who sends me monthly postcards that document his travels and book recommendations, over an anchovy and onion pizza. A journalist, author and screenwriter — and my main career mentor — he got me a job at The Baltimore Sun as a copy girl. In an email after our visit, he writes: “In your face I still see the million-dollar smile, but something about your aging seems well-earned. The crinkles around the eyes don’t lie about what they’ve seen.”

Well, I can’t argue. A reporter’s eye can be brutally frank.

Once back on the highway toward New York, I toggle between those conversations, pledging never to let the “crinkles” keep me from jumping on metaphorical desks.

I don’t know a stranger

In college, Kim Saviano and I studied abroad, doing a semester at the University of Oxford. We’ve seen each other maybe twice since then and talk one to three times a year. But I think of her often, because a colorful drawing we created together back in the day hangs in my office.

“You seem to be able to have conversations with absolutely anyone, as your adventure yesterday kind of showed,” Kim, now a software engineer with purple-tinted hair, says from her Colorado living room.

I tell her about how I fell into a deep discussion with a guy I’d met the day before, after asking him for directions. We talked about life and values while he helped me get my bearings, and as I waved goodbye — after we got a picture together — he told me I’d given him “God chills.”

I don’t know exactly what that means, but Kim says, “Those are the ripples, right?”

I can’t believe she referenced our drawing, which we titled Water, Water Everywhere and has at its center a rippling pool of water. With our very different personalities, Kim and I used to talk about how we’re on different sides of a pond, but our ripples eventually reach, and influence, each other.

“That image has always stuck in my mind,” she says. “I think you probably give people God chills pretty often.”

This only confirms what I sensed in my gut, which is that everything — everyone — is connected. It also validates that we always have a purpose, even when we’re lost.

The last word

What I discovered during this adventure is surprising, not because of how much I’ve changed but because of how much I haven’t. That’s not a bad thing — I believe it’s worse to wonder where your authentic self (to use an overused but spot-on phrase) has gone.

I shared my findings with my therapist, who responded that these were clearly steps I needed to take to rethink some of the ways I think about myself. So, she said, instead of thinking about myself as a person who has experienced immense trauma, I can view myself as a person who is living very joyfully and effectively, even though I experienced trauma. Those types of reframes, she said, make a big impact on your confidence, sense of self and who you are in your relationships.

It has been good to figure myself out. I like how my friend Sue Lautenslager put it when I told her about my experience: “I think it’s an unusual thing, to be the way you are.”